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Internet Consumers (Released to the web October 8, 2007) Caveat emptor, let the buyer beware, is a concept that takes on a critical role in the realm of internet based information. In a previous article on this website, readers were cautioned that educators and parents are way behind the curve in assisting young people to develop the needed skills for productive internet use: "... instead of teaching students how to use certain "safe" websites for research, we need to teach them how to evaluate all sources of information for accuracy, bias, relevance, qualifications of the author, and similar qualities. That includes advertising, print and broadcast media, research, textbooks and non-fiction books, as well as websites, wikipedia, blogs and instant messaging." While educators and parents have concentrated on the dangers of internet predators and exposure to inappropriate content, we have almost completely ignored what is arguably a greater problem. Namely, children lack the skills, the perspective and the practice to effectively evaluate internet based information for truth and quality. If this doesn't sound like such a big deal, consider some background. Young students today use the internet to the near exclusion of all other sources of information when researching or exploring for school work. Even the function of a dictionary has been supplanted by net based resources. Teachers regularly encourage or require students to use websites and other web resources for homework. In previous eras students used resources from libraries and purchases from bookstores for homework and research. In that era, information was filtered by multiple layers of adults. Book publishers edited the work of authors and evaluated the information or opinion based on factual and economic criteria. Booksellers evaluated the resulting product based on mainstream demand and similar economic factors. Librarians, educators and parents helped children choose source material from all that was available based on age-appropriateness and reputation. These and other layers of review served as an unofficial vetting process so that false, misleading, damaging or otherwise harmful information was generally kept out of the hands of children not yet able to distinguish from truth and lies, or good and bad. Even as the computer age expanded into this model, games and CD-based encyclopedias went through a similar vetting process. Enter the internet. Today the layers of adult review which formerly served to filter out the bad from the good are gone--bypassed in favor of a new model in which authors are connected directly with their audience. This is a favorable development in many ways, but it also opens up the possibility for stunning abuse of young minds (and sometimes older minds, too) not yet wise to the ways of the world. Even worse, the adult educators and parents who have not truly wrapped their heads around this new model are pushing children to explore this world without any of the tools and skills necessary to critically evaluate information they find in their exploration. What we have done is to leave our children alone in Grand Central Station with nothing more than some advice that they look around for someone they would like to meet or that they buy a ticket to somewhere they would like to go. To really grasp just how dangerous and insidious this direct model can be, consider how easy it is for a person or a group to post a website that looks legitimate but which actually provides false or intentionally misleading information. A student looking for information on Martin Luther King for a school report or project might easily stumble upon a website like this one: Type in your browser: martinlutherking [dot] org We will not provide the actual link to this website because we don't want to improve it's ranking in search engines. Search engines sometimes rank websites based on the number of links to it from other sites on the web. You see, this website, which looks perfectly legitimate at first glance, is actually published by a neo-Nazi "white nationalist" group and it is designed to sully the reputation of Martin Luther King. Would a young middle school student have the wherewithal to know this is a bogus site? Maybe or maybe not. Perhaps intentionally misleading information on websites about politics or people is easier for a young student to identify than, say, false information in science, or history or mathematics. All of that exists, and more. Without prior knowledge of the subject area, a student must have sophisticated tools for a systematic analysis of an information source to avoid being duped. We are not providing these tools for our elementary aged children now, but we easily could. At the college level, educators are recognizing this problem and formulating systems for students to use to evaluate web resources. College libraries frequently caution students to analyze web information for things like authorship, publishing group, referral to or from other sources, verifiability, currency of information, and clues to ownership using the mechanics of internet conventions. Examining the mechanics might mean the consideration of the domain type, analyzing the web address, or using a whois lookup to determine ownership. A .gov or .edu address might lend credibility to information, but if a .edu address is followed by a slash and a tilde, and then a user name, the information might well be created by an unsupervised student or user at a school, not an official source there. If a whois lookup indicates ownership by a group different from what is contained in the website address, suspicions should be aroused. These sorts of exercises can easily be accomplished by middle school students who are old enough to explore on their own, provided they are physically monitored by an adult and provided they are using search engines with a filter mode. Children in this age group can benefit from and should be exposed to formal evaluation processes for any internet information they use in the course of school work:
Providing middle school children with a detailed form to help them evaluate any internet based information they use for school work is a good way to reinforce the importance and the practice of a critical eye. This form in PDF format created by readingtonparents.org combines advice from experts for evaluation of internet information and can be used by parents and educators as a starting point. Lessons comparing and contrasting real internet sites to look for hoaxes, intentionally or unintentionally misleading information, or sites of superior quality are another method of helping students recognize good from bad. For younger students, these skills can also be introduced slowly. However, it may be wiser to take advantage of software tools which pre-filter content available for searches and other preventative measures. Alternatively, directly supervising internet exploration can allow parents and educators to provide direction on internet use as it happens and while teachable moments pop up. Sometimes literally. There is no question that chat-rooms, pornography, online pedophiles, and other high-profile internet dangers are real. However, by focusing on those dangers to the exclusion of more mundane internet issues related to children we are setting up the next generation to become passive consumers of anything that anyone with a web address wants to publish. Historically such passivity, such unthinking blind acceptance, has allowed destructive ideas to flourish, eventually corrupting and bringing down entire societies and nations. Right now we need to insist in our schools and in our homes that our young students be taught how to critically evaluate the information they discover on the internet, or, for that matter, anywhere else. The information age is still in its infancy and we, as adults raised under a different model, have been caught off-guard by its sudden rise. A formal and systematic program of evaluating information must be a part of school for our young students, and we must quickly come to the understanding that what is most important for students is not how to create a Powerpoint slide or how to look up a word in an internet dictionary. Rather, what is most important is how to decipher truth from falsehood, quality from garbage, and fact from opinion in an environment where we have connected students directly with authors. Our children are consumers of information, vast and readily available, and we must teach them the value of their intellectual dollar before they spend it on things wasteful, inferior, dangerous, or corrupt. For further study: http://eduscapes.com/tap/topic32.htm http://school.discoveryeducation.com/schrockguide/eval.html http://www.lib.purdue.edu/ugrl/staff/sharkey/interneteval/ http://www.lib.berkeley.edu/TeachingLib/Guides/Internet/Evaluate.html
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